One of the things that I wasn’t a huge fan of with Unraid was the reliance on a USB key for both booting the device and handling the licensing for the product on the server that it was running on. While USB keys aren’t horrible on their own they aren’t super reliable and I do tend to kill them on a fairly regular basis.
It’s not been a huge issue because the things are cheap enough that they aren’t even worth bothering to RMA them when they fail.
For a piece of install media or where I’m just passing files between machines that’s not an issue but for the device that boots one of my more important servers, that’s not ideal.
The latest release of Unraid did two things that changed this.
The first was to give the option to tie the licensing to the TPM module on the computer, if you happen to have one. Generally these are used to store the keys for encryption and other sensitive information, however in this case it means that the license for my server doesn’t reside on a 20$ piece of hardware that’s commonly prone to failure over time.
The second was to add support for what they are calling “Internal Boot” – in short all that means is that you can boot from an internal disk instead of a USB device. Something that’s going to boost reliability since SSD’s generally last longer than a USB key. It’s also opened up the ability to use a mirrored set of SSD’s for your boot, so that when one does fail your server doesn’t wind up dead in the water.
So, given that the changes do take care of two of the things that I wasn’t fond of with Unraid I sat down this weekend and stepped through their walkthroughs to move over to using the TPM and a internal boot device for booting the server. The process was painless – and gave me an excuse to get around to installing a HBA that was sent my way and getting a a 3d printed mount in place to hold a fan over the thing to keep it cool.
Either case the server is back up and running now, hopefully the HPA helps performance a bit, but the real reason for tossing that in was to free up some more SATA ports for additional disks in the future. Eventually I’m going to need more capacity on the server an at that point having a couple of extra pots to slot in some larger disks to start replacing things will be very helpful.